This episode begins with color: blue for sadness, red for panic, yellow for rare hope. I explore how emotion lives in the body long after language fades, how the nervous system paints its own portrait of what we have endured and become.
In “The Color My Brain Remembers,” I move through those shades, tracing how people translate loss, faith, and resilience into something visible. The poem speaks to memory as texture, the way feeling can color a whole room before a single word is spoken.
What follows is a conversation between therapy and art, between the personal and the cultural. I draw from Internal Family Systems and trauma research, as well as the stories our communities carry, showing how color becomes archive, survival code, and language of becoming.
By the end, the focus is not on explaining healing but on recognizing its tone, that quiet, unnamed color between exhaustion and hope.
“The Color My Brain Remembers” invites you to notice the colors that live within your story and to imagine what new shades might rise when you allow them to be seen.
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Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
00:19 - Colors of the Brain
02:47 - The Poem: the color my brain remembers
06:00 - The Literary Breakdown
08:38 - The Clinical Breakdown
12:40 - Reflection Questions
14:03 - Exploring Colors
15:11 - Second Reading: the color my brain remembers
18:17 - Closing
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Carl's Publication
The Mis-Execution of a Black Son by Carl Patterson, LPC - https://amzn.to/3UyX6nP
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Book Resources
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Poetry Related Books
• The Book of Healing — Najwa Zebian
• Poems of Healing — Edited by Karl Kirchwey
• I See You: Healing Through Poetry — Corrina Wilson
Psychology Related Books
• No Bad Parts — Richard C. Schwartz